The Daily Signal - BONUS | ‘Not Legitimate’: Corporate Media Works Against Average American, Mollie Hemingway Says

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

The Right must fight back in the information war waged by left-wing media, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Molly Hemingway says, adding that conservatives should take their cues from how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis treats "false reporting." Relevant Links Listen to other podcasts from The Daily Signal: https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts/ Get daily conservative news you can trust from our Morning Bell newsletter: DailySignal.com/morningbellsubscription   Listen to more Heritage podcasts: https://www.heritage.org/podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Elizabeth Troutman with The Daily Signal here at CPAC with Molly Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of the Federalist, a regular Fox News contributor and senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College. She has been a senior editor at the Federalist since its founding. In 2021, she won the Bradley Prize for her distinguished reporting and commentary. She has written two books, Justice on Trial, the Kavanaugh Confirmation, and the future of the Supreme Court, and rigged how the media, big tech, and the Democrat seized our elections. So how did you get into the media? and how long have you been doing this?

You know, it's interesting because I didn't start out. It was not my first career. I studied economics. I thought I wanted to be an economist. I started graduate school to do this. Pretty much quickly realized that was not what I wanted to do. And I had all these friends who were in the media, and they loved their jobs.

And I noticed that, and I thought, you know what? You know, I've always been interested in the media. And so I gave it a go. And I am so glad I did. I love being able to report about all sorts of different things. I've reported on the federal government, on the military, on religion and politics, and it's just a great way to help Americans know about what's going on in their country. And it's particularly important given how many people who are in the media are basically just straight up propagandists. And heading into the 2024 election, what do you think we can expect from mainstream media outlets and how they cover candidates?

So if I can first off push back on your use of the term mainstream, There is nothing mainstream about the propaganda press, the corporate media. They do not represent the views of average Americans by any stretch of the imagination. They support really radical ideas, whether they're economic or cultural, that the vast majority of Americans, and even in some cases, the vast majority of Democrats don't share. So I think it's important that everyone recognize who they are, what they do, and not call them mainstream because they are not. they do not represent the average American.

They actually work against the average American. And that's true whether they're pushing like gender radicalism or whether they're suppressing news and information that is a vital importance to the American people during elections or otherwise. One thing I find interesting about the 2024 race, we have seen one candidate in particular show a little, he's not an announced candidate yet.

Ron DeSantis has a totally different approach to corporate press than most Republicans do. He refuses to treat them like they are legitimate because they are not legitimate. That's Ron DeSantis. He won't give them press credentials to allow them to, like, blow up his events. He always questions the assumptions behind their questions. He calls them out for their false reporting. Recently, he refused to appear on NBC until NBC apologized for mischaracterizing something that he had done.

He got them to actually apologize. this is how you should behave toward a press that lies, that invent stories, and that it just does not deserve to be treated as legitimate because they're not. And your latest book covered how big tech, the media, and Democrats seized the 2020 election. What inspired you to write rigged, and what did you learn from writing it? I just felt after the 2020 election, there were a lot of conspiracy theories out there from both left and right that I didn't, wasn't sure about.

On the left, you had people saying that even though this election was unlike any election we had ever seen that it was perfect in every way. There was nothing wrong with it. And then you had on the other side people talking about Venezuela and weird stuff. So I just knew from experience that if I wanted to know something, I had to dig into it. And so I dug into it. And I looked at how we had changed hundreds of laws and processes in the lead up in the months prior to this election, how sometimes they were done constitutionally and sometimes they weren't. how we had seen for the first time in history,

a billionaire-funded private takeover of government election offices in the blue areas of swing states, how this had a material effect on what the vote totals were. And this election was like the closest we've seen in a very long time. It came down to like 40,000 votes. Well, it was pretty close also in 2016. It came down to 40,000 votes in three states. That means every little thing counts.

And so I just wanted to look into it. Also the suppression of news and information by big tech and corporate media. I thought was an important thing too. And I'm so glad I looked into it. I feel like I have a much better handle on U.S. election systems and administration, how important it is to get them right. And also what a big threat to a free republic are corporate media and big tech are. Do you expect similar patterns to what you saw in 2020 and 2024?

The thing that was so different about 2020 was such a radical change. in so many different states. You have a little bit more experience now. I think you also have Republicans realizing that Democrats are no longer running persuasion campaigns. You know, persuasion campaigns where you actually try to get people to vote for you because they want to.

A ballot operation is just about moving a ballot, getting a ballot in the hands of someone and moving it into the ballot box. They might not even know there's an election, they might not know what the issues are, they might not know what to vote for. But if you control the process, you can kind of get more ballots than your opponent.

And I think Republicans, they know that's bad for the republic, that's true, but they also understand that if they're going to play, they have to play the game as well. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Equal Rights Amendment, which would enshrine abortion in the Constitution. We have discussed the ways you believe feminism has made women unhappy. Would the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment continue this trend, and if so, how? Yeah, it's so interesting because the Equal Rights Amendment was something I think we killed before I was even born, and it's like refusing to die, and so it's coming back in.

When conservative women destroyed the first attempt to pass this Equal Rights Amendment, they warned that denying the reality of distinctions between the sexes would be a bad thing for society. One thing that's interesting is now feminists and other activists have managed to get some of those things into place. I remember Phyllis Schlafly would say that if you pass the ERA, you wouldn't be able to have sex-specific private restrooms. Guess what? We don't have sex-specific private restrooms anymore because of the gender radicalism that's in play right now.

But I think younger women are more aware of how the early waves of feminism were kind of this false promise of happiness. You know, over the last like six or seven decades, women's happiness has declined as men's happiness has increased relative to women's happiness. And that makes sense because what feminism teaches is a false, you know, it's a false. It's a false belief that not caring for family and not caring about having a family will make you happy, and that's just not true. And has media coverage of the ERA properly depicted its nature? Oh my gosh. Nothing that the media covers depicts its proper nature, and this would be no exception. I think part of the problem is a lot of the women who are in media are, they don't represent average women.

So the average woman wants to have a family. She wants to be able to take care of her family and also probably work some. What's portrayed in the media is if every single woman wants the corner office at some like soulless corporation, and everything has to be built toward that aim. And that's just that doesn't represent what the average woman wants. And the risks and downsides of any amendment, you know, such as this, are never promoted. and then sort of a false view of what would be good about it is. I'm speaking with Molly Hemingway here at CPAC,

and how have you seen media bias influence the discussion around transgender issues, particularly when it comes to children who want to change their gender? Yeah, so this is a big thing that I think is interesting is how corporate media are engaged in some real deceptive wordplay related to the gender radicalism that's in play right now. So, for instance, they will say, So they refer to something as gender affirming surgery or gender affirming treatment. And what they're actually referring to, they'll say, like, this child should have gender affirming.

What that means is actual mutilation of healthy body parts or permanent sterilization of the reproductive system. It's like gross, like criminally gross type of thing they're talking about, but they use these euphemisms to describe it. Another thing they do is they start saying that you were to use false pronouns to describe someone. So if you have a man who says that he is a female, they say, you should call him a female. You should call that person by false pronouns. And this type of, you know, if you control the language, you actually do control the way people think about things. So people who want to be free need to fight very hard to make sure that they use proper words to describe reality. And why do you believe the media defends biological males playing women's sports?

I don't actually know entirely, and I should have much more of an understanding. This is one of those issues that I was referring to earlier. Even like 70% of Democrats do not believe that women should be forced to play sports with men, particularly underage girls having to play sports with boys. But this is something pushed very hard by question. corporate press. It is true that the corporate press are far, far, far more leftist than even the average Democrat. They've always been that way. And there is this some sort of like sick thing they have about destroying the family that seems to underlie a lot of what they've pushed for over

the years in their cultural jihad. And since the overturn of Rovi Wade, we have seen some media outlets demonize pregnancy centers. How has media framing of the abortion issue shaped the national narrative. Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, there, there have been all these attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers, Christian churches, and first and foremost, the media barely paid attention to that. They're very good at covering if there's any sort of problem at an abortion clinic. They're very bad at covering what's happening at pro-life pregnancy care centers, maternal care centers. And that would be another thing. They just don't actually accurately report what happens in a maternal care center, how much of it is about helping young women in the early

stages of becoming mothers, not just about helping them avoid making a decision toward abortion. And abortion is one of those topics that is among the worst in terms of bias and deception from the media. The language they use, the terms they choose, they are very committed to supporting abortion and it shows. And as the conflict in Ukraine has reached its one-year anniversary, what do you think the media has done well in covering it and what should it have done differently? Okay, well, on this topic, and I'm sorry to be so negative, Elizabeth, I think that they've done almost nothing right.

There's a long-standing bias towards support of war, no matter how ill-advised it may be. There's sort of like an excitement in the corporate press. It is exciting. I've been able to cover some of these things. There's a lot of news and whatnot. But they were not critical or skeptical enough of whether it was such a good idea to go to war, a proxy war in Ukraine. They didn't seem to understand the lengthy decades of history leading up to this. And it doesn't mean in any way that you have to support or even think even remotely well of what Russia is doing to say that you should probably understand what they're doing or why they think it's in their interest to be doing something.

It actually makes you much better able to fight it if you properly understand what's going on. We haven't had, we've had a lot of propaganda, and I really mean that term propaganda when it comes to discussing this. We don't have good numbers on casualties. We're being told things that don't even make sense that completely conflict. For instance, they'll say, oh, if you don't get involved in this war, Putin will overtake all of Europe. And then in the next breath, they'll say, wow, Putin's army has no ability to fight. Well, you can't have both of those things happening in the same statement. It's so important because unlike some of our previous ill-advised or poorly designed wars,

for instance, in the last 18 years in Afghanistan, or the entire Iraq war conflict, or what we did in Libya or how we switched sides in Syria, those were involving countries that did not have nuclear weapons, whereas Russia has 6,500 nuclear weapons. That means they don't have to accept conventional defeat, And it means we should be thinking very strategically. We should be statesmen in how we do this. And the media could have a role to play. And I will say, quite recently,

I've seen some media acknowledging reality there and having a slightly different tune. And is there anything else you would like to share with the Daily Signal audience about media bias in 2023? Just that we are in an information war right now and corporate press is funded to an amazing degree, whether it's The New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN or NBC, or really the entire media architecture with just a few exceptions.

And given that the odds are so against conservatives, I think we've done a really good job of fighting their disinformation and misinformation. But because they're combining with big tech to suppress conservative publications and outlets, we need to treat it like the information war it is, fund the information war properly, invest in those people that are pushing against the fake news and who care about. actually reporting real news. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an honor to speak with you.

Thank you, Elizabeth. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans,

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